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Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
121–130 of 177 posts
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a name!..
Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia, plural). Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis" is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person. Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.
I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means male genitalia in a foreign language.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#123At Clarify.io, we're making audio & video searchable. Unlike a general purpose ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) engine, we perform a bunch of automated analysis to tune the engine and optimize it for the particular language, accent, and a variety of other things. We've found that our accuracy is much higher than a general purpose one.
The founders went through Techstars London 2013 and moved to Austin right after. We raised 1.4M last fall from a mix of angels and VCs.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#124Sandstorm.io ( https://sandstorm.io ) is working on turning server infrastructure and security upside-down without the need to rewrite applications. The goal is for distributed infrastructure and security to be as easy as possible for end users to manage, and as hard as possible for applications to screw up. The model we're building is capability-based; previous capability-based research systems have usually required…
Wondering why you're not actively hiring?
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they're obviously not Scandinavian (where the name means male genitalia, plural). Funfact: in the northern parts of Norway, calling a policeman a "horses penis" is not illegal, as that is a somewhat common thing to call another person. Yes, this was tested in court in 2008.
I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means male genitalia in a foreign language.
Interestingly enough, the number of [1] http://norvig.com/mayzner.html
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#126I had a start up that was working on hard technically challenging problems.
We were a spin-off of the MIT mind machine project. We were working on cognitive modeling with the long-term goal of modeling intention awareness, which is modeling cognition (knowledge and emotions) with a time component.
We were working on knowledge graph theory, blending over time, based on all written communication of an individual or population sub-group.
It proved to be too soon - probably about 10 years too early. We needed more data from individuals - email wasn't enough. We probably needed daily recording of all interactions to build a knowledge graph of an individual. But even working with email data it was too much information - we could barely process all of it especially when blending with a time vector.
Google glass was hopeful for acquiring enough interaction data for a person and their daily lives, but it proved inadequate (no one used it). The closest data set to what we needed was recordings of all interactions on the ISS.
This will be necessary to model a human personality AI at the beta level (copy of an individual based on observations of that person).
We've since moved off on to other projects.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you justify to yourself working under a CEO who proposed making a smear campaign against Julian Assange?
A third party (HB Gary) — not Palantir and certainly not its CEO — suggested the 'offensive' campaign against Wikileaks. Palantir — and specifically its CEO — immediately disclaimed involvement or interest in both that plan, or anything of its general type. How do you justify to yourself slandering a company by claiming nearly the exact opposite of what happened?
That is not true. Palantir along with HBGary and Berico Technologies authored the report suggesting an 'offensive' campaign. [1]
They did apologize for this and as you say, disclaimed involvement or interest in such a plan. [2]
[1] https://wikileaks.org/IMG/pdf/WikiLeaks_Response_v6.pdf
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#128Sandstorm.io ( https://sandstorm.io ) is working on turning server infrastructure and security upside-down without the need to rewrite applications. The goal is for distributed infrastructure and security to be as easy as possible for end users to manage, and as hard as possible for applications to screw up. The model we're building is capability-based; previous capability-based research systems have usually required…
Wondering why you're not actively hiring?
We only just raised a seed round[0], which only gives us money to hire a couple of people, and we already have more really awesome candidates than we have budget to hire. So basically we're all set on hiring until Series A (2016?). You can feel free to e-mail jobs@sandstorm.io if you think you're an exceptional case, but probably the answer will be: "Sorry, we don't have budget or bandwidth to interview more people right now. :("
[0] https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-15-sandstorm-1.3M-see...
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
No doubt health insurance is hard problem, but it's not technically hard . OP asked for examples of company's pushing the limits of advanced technology, and Oscar is not one.
It's not? Why do you feel that way?
It's not solving difficult problems in algorithms, systems engineering, hardware, ML, AI, etc.
Nothing wrong with that. But using today's technology in web and mobile to build a highly-usable customer experience, is not what OP meant by hard technical problems.
Re: Ask HN: What startups are working on hard, technically challenging problems?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compute on the GPU is unlikely to be unified in a meaningful way with the CPU in the near future. The GPU is a massive SIMD machine in contrast to the CPU. Even if you use the same language for both, the style of code & algorithms are very different.
Check out the AMD APU. We've had good experiences with recent Intel integrated as well due to embedded RAM. You are right though in that we write our code with data parallel and sometimes manycore SIMT in mind.
I worked on the Intel integrated embedded RAM a couple years ago (before release)! It was tough getting the h/w bugs out. Are you using it in Windows or Linux?